Interview questions for an Android developer
Android Interview Questions and Answers
(Continued from previous question...)
Interview questions for an Android developer
- How do you write apps for multiple screen sizes (no fixed coordinates, use nine patch drawables, favor density independent pixels over pixel).
- What are the problems publishing to the market, with the fragmentation of Android in multiple OS Versions and multiple phones.
- What is the basic setup of an Android app?
- How do you define the user interface? (Mostly xml). (when do you use xml, when do you do stuff in Java?)
- What do you have to do to test a new program on a real phone?
- What is the result of the compilation process (An apk that bundles resources like image and class files)
- What are services? What should be done in a service?
- Tell me some strategies for making the most out of your UI? (What will make it snappy? What will bog it down?)
- Lets say you have to create an app like an email client, how/when would you get the data from the server?
- Explain Intents. What are some examples
- What is Fragementation? What can be done about it?
- How would you go about making an app work with different languages? (different images and text)
- What is coming up next in Android development? What devices are you excited about? (shows how much the candidate is looking to the future)
- Explain the differences between the last two major OS releases? (In our case it would be Froyo/Gingerbread/Honeycomb. This will tell how much they know the platform)
- What is your debug setup like? (ie: actual device vs emulator, multiple emulators?)
- How much experience do you have writing unit tests? What technologies have you used?
- What are ways to automate building and running unit tests? (looking for something like "Maven")
- How do you make images that scale nicely on Android at different resolutions? (looking for nine-patch)
- Explain the lifcycle of an activity? (http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#ActivityLifecycle)
- What is StrictMode(http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/StrictMode.html)
- What are the ways to store data? Lets say things like
- If it is the users first time and you need to show something just the first time?
- Cache an image from the internet to be show everytime they launch the app
- A list of "favorite" items
- When should you use internal vs external storage? What is the difference?
- (http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/data-storage.html)
- Have you done any widget development? What are the main differences?
- What causes memory leakes? How can you find them? (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/03/memory-analysis-for-android.html)
- If you need to "Notify" a user of something every once in a while, how would you do it? (probably looking for C2DM, then ask:)
- How does it work? Have you implemented it before?
- Have you rooted your phone? Custom ROM? (This will tell a lot about the candidate, and if they are a tinkerer. I would hope they are under the hood on their phone)
- Have you gone to any conferences? User groups? How do you participate in the community? What is your stackoverflow score?
- What are your side projects? What have you done for fun? (Huge points if they have a "fun" project in the market)
Other Interview Questions
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